Symbols for transforms

I was looking through HTML entities and ran across ℱ. I searched for all entities ending in trf; and also found ℳ, ℒ, and ℨ.

Apparently “trf” stands “transform” and these symbols are intended to be used to represent the Fourier transform, Mellin transform, Laplace transform, and z-transform.

You would not know from the Unicode names that these symbols are intended to be used for transforms. For example, U+2131 has Unicode name SCRIPT CAPITAL F. But the HTML entity ℱ suggests how the symbol could be used.

These are not the symbols I’d use for these transforms if I had access to LaTeX. I’d use {\cal F} for the Fourier transform, for example. But if I were writing about math and restricted to Unicode symbols, as I am on Twitter, I might use these symbols. I could imagine, for example, using ℒ for Laplace transform on @AnalysisFact.

Here’s a table with more on the four transform symbols that have HTML entities.

| ℒ      | ℒ | U+2112  | SCRIPT CAPITAL L       |
| ℨ      | ℨ     | U+2128  | BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL Z |
| ℱ      | ℱ | U+2131  | SCRIPT CAPITAL F       |
| ℳ      | ℳ  | U+2133  | SCRIPT CAPITAL M       |

Related posts